Yes, that’s right, you can use Github Pages to host your personal or organization projects directly on Github.

I’m really a fan of the Ruby language since 2011 when I’ve worked as a Ruby on Rails developer, so why not using this language to define my personal blog?

There are a lot of resources out there with step by step guides, how you can achieve this: I suggest to start with official https://pages.github.com documentation.

This is how I did it:

a) Define github code location of my blog

https://github.com/paulbrodner/paulbrodner.github.io

Simple as that, according to official docs you will be able to access your site at http://paulbrodner.github.io/

b) Define work items using Github Projects

I like to keep my work items organized, I want to track and update my work from one place so my project will be finalized on schedule, that’s why I’ve used “Projects” feature of Github where I define one Automated Kanban board named “blog”:

The interesting part of the automated Kanban board is that when a new issue or pull request is opened, that item is moved to To Do column.

When I start working on one item, I move it In Progress

In the Done column, you will see items that are closed.

All issues have assigned a label to them so I can easily filter and sort-out what I want.

c) Implementation

I focused my attention on Jekyllrb - a framework for transforming plain text into static blogs.

Jekyllrb is using Liquid an open-source language that will process our markdown templates.

I have my framework identified, but what template should I use?

My desired template was a minimal responsive theme Jekyll-Uno.

• checkout my good first issue #1 that will define this structure

d) Testing

• I have my structure now, I am an Automation Engineer, so I need a way - one automated way to test my changes if I want to create a blog post for example. Issue #8 will do that for me:

Behind the scenes, I’ve used html-proofer gem. More details on this blog post

d) Enhancements

The planning board will filter all enhancement that I’ve done on top of Jekyll-Uno.

• ability to generate new blog pages automatically (source #11) To sum-up I have a Rakefile that will call the the existing Jekyll generators in one interactive way, asking you what is the new post title, date, if is a draft or not, etc.
• search capabilities by JSON data (source #12) I’m defining a new “search.html” page that will contain the search code and one search.json that will automatically generate in JSON format the entire condent of this blog. Thanks to Simple-Jekyll-Search

Search is available on the top right corner - needs some improvements in terms of responsiveness, but I’m happy with it for now.